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A number of years ago a woman in her early 30's, "Barbara" came to an
Opening the Heart workshop for the first time. On Friday night, sitting in a chair facing the
whole group, she told the following story in a flat, emotionless voice: She woke up one
morning to find that her husband of 5 years had died in the night of a massive heart attack-
4 months before the birth of their first child. When the baby was 6 months old, he died of
crib death, and Barbara entered a dark landscape of paralytic grief for almost 5 years before
coming to the Heart workshop. I would like to tell you that the workshop was a deeply
healing, emotionally cathartic experience but I don't know that that was true. But on
Sunday, at the Closing Circle, Barbara cried one tear, the only emotion I had seen in
working with her the whole weekend, and then she said she now knew what she had to do to
move forward....

Two weeks ago, in Kennesumma, a small seaside town in northeastern Japan, a man,
almost 70, wandered dazed through the wreckage of what had been his home. He'd been a
barber. He lost his business, his wife and three children. When a reporter asked him how he
was going to start over, he said "I think it's too late for me. I'm too old. I've lost too
much... But I will try...."

In mid March 1959 as evening descended on Lhasa, Tibet, His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
accompanied by a very few trusted protectors, disguised themselves as soldiers, slipped out
of the royal palace, past the Chinese camp and onto a rough trading route headed toward
India and freedom almost 100 miles away. It had been10 years of brutal repression,
murder, torture and broken promises by the Chinese on the peaceful and beautiful country
of Tibet. Within 24 hours of the Dalai Lama escaping, the Chinese bombed the palace,
destroying the Dalai Lama's home, ancestral treasures, and killing thousands of innocent
Tibetans. For 52 years His Holiness has watched from his government in exile in Dharmsala,
India as the Chinese have destroyed monestaries .and tortured "imperialist
reactionaries". He watches with a broken heart as his country and his culture have
been "reintegrated into the Motherland". At the end of Martin Scorcese's movie
"Kundun" about the Dalai Lama's life, the screen shows two written lines that
read "The Dalai Lama has never been back to Tibet. He hopes to return one day".
In all these years, this great man has never stopped embracing nonviolence and compassion
as the only way to heal suffering in the world.

It moves me in a very deep place to witness people who seem to have been stripped of
everything and yet they just don't let go of their faith and their love. Naomi Shihab Nye in
her poem "Kindness" says that before you can know kindness as the deepest
thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.: Roger Housden wrote that
when we know that sorrow "as a lived experience", then it is that very pain and
suffering that connect us to what's deepest and best in every one of us.